But what happens if you are a company the size of Microsoft but without their budget ? Or a company smaller than Microsoft but with their budget ?

Do the directors of companies asking these questions simply cross their fingers and hope the devs dont produce too many bugs so they can then grow enough to start employing testers ? and also hope that by that stage the code hasn't grown into an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti

Whilst writing this blog I read a tweet from Simon Godfrey trying to deal with devs complaining that test hadn't found all the defects and wanting the test cost to be 15% of the dev budget( hmm, wonder what percentage of the dev budget is spent on customer support... )

I'm blaming Philip Crosby and his Quality Is Free slogan, managers saw the title but never read the content...

Monday, 26 January 2009

Dear Valued ClientDue to security reasons we will want you to confirm your access details by clicking on the verfiy my account details link below

This is due to the fact that a recent review of your account by our security team shows that the use of your account might have been compromised. for security reasons we will want you to verify your account information withing 24 hours

Verify My account Details

Failure to do this will lead to restricted access to your account for security reason.

Whilst I was thinking about this, Joe Strazzere posted an example of his own of a phishing phailure.

Almost comforting to know that the bad guys are having the same problems as us but I did wonder about how they operate...Do they have specs ?Argue about waterfall or agile ?Do their testers write test plans, regression tests, run performance tests on their fake sites ? Is the testing outsourced ? ( waiting for an " I have to test phishing emails pls hlp " posting on SQA Forums )

Is there a crime overlord somewhere pounding a desk with his fist wanting to know why testing didn't find the bugs that me and Joe found ?

Tuesday, 20 January 2009

Read an interesting blog post today about Software Testing Crafsmanship and moving through the stages from apprentice to journeyman and then master and relating this to the Japanese martial arts concept of Shu Ha Ri

I'd also read an article over the weekend Hard Work and Practice in Programming about how to practice and improveOne quote from there is this"So, I think we'd all agree that you can't learn to program without actually programming. Just like you can't learn to drive without actually driving. You can't learn math without doing math. Yet, one of the hardest things to accomplish in teaching is to get students (end users) to actually program or do math or work on the skill it is they are trying to acquire."

For programming I can see how you can practice and become better - write a program, see if it works, refactor it to make it more efficient. The end result is there - the program will work or notIf you wanted to learn HTML/CSS then find some web pages you like, view the source and try it our yourself

Is there a similar list to becoming an expert tester ? Get hold of a program and try and find bugs in it ?Join an open source project ?Sign up to be a beta tester ?

The problem with testing compared to programming is that although the definition of testing may be 'providing information to the stakeholders' if you are practising testing then designing and running 20 tests that all pass isn't going to give you the same feelgood factor as writing then running a program

Going along with some of s/w development analogiesIt's like cooking - the more you practice the better the food will tasteIt's like music - from a slow few chords that vaguely sound like Smoke on the Water to being able to crank out Eruption

With testing you want to be able to find the serious bugs as soon as possible, so how can you practice that ? Is there a supply of programs with bugs in that your tests will find ? ( I can just imagine the reponses I'm going to get to that ! )

Monday, 12 January 2009

Over on the uTest blog there's a list of some of the high profile bugs that have been in the news recently. There's also plenty of minor bugs around that aren't going to make the news.

Saturday night I switched TV channels to Sky Sports to watch the Spanish football, hit the Info button on the remote to find out who was playing and found out that one of the teams was apparently Deportivo de La Coru204321a

The team is actually Deportivo de La Coruña, seems there was some problem with the ' ñ ' character

Maybe I should subscribe to the foreign film channel to see if there are any other problems, purely in the cause of research of course...

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Got a small taste of that for myself todayAlong with others I'd helped review the latest book from Gojko Adzic - Bridging the Communication Gap and Gojko was nice enough to send me a copy of the published book...

and there was a quote from yours truly at the start and a namecheck in the Acknowledgements section and it is a good feeling

I'll re-read the book soon and post a review, bur first I have that MS Book to finish...

If QA isn't part of the development process then what else is there for QA to do ?

"I've been in more than a few places where most of the testers were Art School dropouts"

Ouch( any Art School droputs reading this blog ? )

Maybe the best solution is something none of us have thought of before. I recommend to start by making QA a real part of the development process. This integrating QA and development. Allow testers to influence development and allow developers to influence the test process somewhat. Let's make code easier to test

SighIt's 2009I really shouldn't be reading stuff like this where suggesting QA really does QA and testers and devs are both involved seems like a radical notion